Skeptical Briefs - Committee for Skeptical Inquiryhttp://www.csicop.org/
enCopyright 20152015-03-27T16:07:10+00:00Jews and ReptiliansWed, 06 Aug 2014 10:16:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/jews_and_reptilians
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/jews_and_reptilians
Following the current flare up of the Israel/Palestine conflict, a meme has been circulating around the Internet. In it, Laurence Fishburne, as the
character Morpheus in The Matrix, is sitting in a comfy chair calmly explaining the hidden nature of reality to Neo:

“What if I told you that Israelis have no historic or genetic connection to Palestine but in fact originate from the Caucasus and a people called the
Khazars?”

In the corner of the image is web address: davidicke.com.

The question here is about the origin of Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews, who comprise around three-quarters of the global Jewish population, a large
percentage of American Jewry, and about half of the Jews in modern Israel. The meme is expressing an idea that is the end result of a long evolution which
is partly rooted in the British colonial rule of Palestine in the late 19th century. The argument in Britain went something like this: “The Holy Land plays
an important part in the final days and the return of Christ. The British Empire currently—and likely will for a long time—governs the Holy Land.
Therefore, we British are preordained to play some important role in the Second Coming. We knew we were special.”

This in turn led to a movement called British-Israelism, the idea that the British are in fact genetically tied to the Jews of the Old Testament,
essentially one of the lost tribes. The belief, when it hopped the pond to the Americas, became the ideological progenitor of the Christian Identity
movement, which posits that God’s chosen people are really white American Christians.

Hence, the idea that there are false Jews.

Really.

The earliest incarnation of the idea that the Ashkenazi Jews descended from Khazars in the Black Sea region appears in 1883 in a lecture given by French
scholar Ernest Renan. Michael Barkun traces the subsequent development of this idea in his Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement, an excellent and detailed book.

In the US, the idea can be traced back through a Klan leader in the 1920s, Reuben H. Sawyer, who popularized the idea that the “authentic Jews” were
Sephardic Jews (those from the Iberian Peninsula and North Africa) and who decried Ashkenazi Jews as imposters who were hell-bent on destroying
Christendom. In the later ‘20s, the popular racial theorist Lothrop Stoddard opined that ancient Hittite sculpture looked really sort of Jewish (Barkun
127), ushering in the idea of a tainted bloodline.

In the 1940s, this idea metastasized in a religious tract called, When? When Gog Attacks, which was authored by an obscure group called the
Anglo-Saxon Christian World Movement. Barkun notes this tract formulated some notions that would reappear in Christian Identity-style anti-Semitism,
including: “Cain as the founder of the ‘synagogue of Satan’; the ‘Turko-Mongol’ origin of Ashkenazi Jews; the blood of fallen angels among Jews; and the
historicity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. As the pamphlet’s author concludes, ‘The Ashkenazim are neither Jews nor Semitic by blood or
race’” (51). (Indeed, in the extreme form of this belief in modern Christian Identity, the root of Jewishness can be found in the union of Eve and the
serpent in the Garden of Eden, which will become an important point when we consider David Icke.)

The idea that the Ashkenazi bloodlines come from Asia (and the corollary notion that Eastern European Jews were mostly converts) denied them any historical
claim to the Holy Land, and this became very important after the Second World War, which saw the dawn of the Cold War and the establishment of the state of
Israel in 1948. Eastern European Jews had long been scapegoated as being responsible for the rise of communism, and Zionism was seen as the mechanism by
which Jews would ascend to global hegemony.

The racist right in the US could look confidently at the establishment of Israel and its subsequent population with Jews from Eastern Europe as justifying
both Cold War fears and religious paranoia. Denying the population of Israel both genetic and historical claims to Palestine was a method of resisting the
commie-globalist Jewish cabal.

Is there any truth to the idea that the Ashkenazi Jews are Khazar? The genetic history of the Jews is complicated (Elhiak, Costa). The Jewish people are
diasporic, widespread throughout the Mediterranean for at least 2000 years. The global migration of Jewry has been the subject of much historical research,
and genetics promises to add additional context to that history. In fact, modern genetics have already shed some light on the ancestry of the Ashkenazi.
According to geneticist Harry Ostrer, the Ashkenazi are genetically more similar to Sephardic Jews of the Mediterranean than they are to their geographic
neighbors, who would presumably share the most genes with the historical Khazars (Yandel).

There are some surprises in the Ashkenazi genome, for instance that mitochondrial DNA, which is inherited exclusively through the maternal line, shows that
half of Ashkenazi Jews share DNA from just four women. There has been much debate about where those women came from, and the evidence suggests they were
European women from the north Mediterranean. While the size of the European contribution to the Ashkenazi genome is the subject of ongoing research,
geneticists seem to agree that the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews are genetically linked and that they share those genetic markers with Jewish populations
from the Middle East (Fischman).

And with Palestinians.

So, why is David Icke circulating the Matrix meme? David Icke is a retired British footballer, sports broadcaster, and Green Party spokesperson who has
embarked on a fourth career as a New Age guru who claims that the world is controlled by capitalist reptilian bloodlines.

Icke has adopted a version of the Matrix meme, that the world is decidedly not as it seems, but is a false image projected into our minds from the hollow
moon, which is also a spaceship. So, the imagery appeals to him. Secondly, it’s often really hard to distinguish the things that Icke says about the lizard
people and the things that run of the mill anti-Semites say about the Jewish New World Order, and I think that the far racist right hears a dog whistle
when he says “reptilian,” which they interpret as “Jews.” It probably confuses things further that the American Christian Identity movement actually thinks
that the people they believe are imposter Jews are descended from the serpent in the Garden of Eden.

Furthermore, Icke has never exactly done much to dissuade people who have made their minds up that he is an anti-Semite. He does, however, seem to think
that the Jews as a group are controlled by outside alien entities, as are Muslims, the Council on Foreign Relations, the UN, the Freemasons, and all other
social institutions. In Icke’s schema, everyone is a pawn, including the Jews.

The scheming that he believes puts Khazars in Israel is not necessarily that of the Jews themselves, which… maybe?... makes it less racist? Maybe?

Works Cited

Barkun, Michael. Religion and the Racist Right: The Origins of the Christian Identity Movement. University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Print.

]]>Skeptic Activists Fighting for Burzynski’s Cancer PatientsThu, 10 Jul 2014 08:46:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/si/show/skeptic_activists_fighting_for_burzynskis_cancer_patients
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/skeptic_activists_fighting_for_burzynskis_cancer_patientsA group of skeptical activists has been aggressively investigating and challenging the false claims of the Burzynski clinic and its dubious cancer treatments, presenting reliable information about them online. They even raised funds for a legitimate research hospital.

One of the most frustrating parts of the thirty-five-year saga of Stanislaw Burzynski is the fact that while it is clear to oncologists and researchers that he has engaged
in disturbing business and research practices, legal and professional actions taken to correct the situation have uniformly failed to protect patients. Furthermore, the media have almost entirely ignored the “consumer protection” angle of the Burzynski story, instead focusing largely on “human interest” stories about patients desperately raising vast sums of money on apparently unpublishable clinical trials. (For background information on Burzynski and his claims, see David H. Gorski’s article “Stanislaw Burzynski: Four Decades of an Unproven Cancer Cure” in this issue.)

While skeptics cannot perform the protective and punitive roles that regulators and courts have been unable to serve, we can step up and do the
investigating, reporting, and editorializing that the media have failed to do. A concerted, sustained effort to do just that began in November 2011, after
bloggers Rhys Morgan, Andy Lewis, Peter Bowditch, Popehat, and others received pseudolegal threats from the Clinic’s representative, Marc Stephens, a web
reputation manager with no legal qualifications. Stephens was sacked when the international media started writing about the story, but over the past year
and a half, a core group of about a dozen skeptics have put ever-increasing pressure on the Burzynski Clinic by challenging its false claims whenever they
appear online and by promoting reliable information about Burzynski’s cancer treatments in ways that are search-engine savvy.1

Just as interest in the Clinic’s bullying tactics seemed to be waning, in mid-June 2012, the Burzynski affair flared up again. This time, blogger Keir
Liddel noticed that a server that hosted several websites of Marc Stephens also hosted jamesrandiusa.org, a new site devoted entirely to smearing skeptics
who had been critical of Burzynski (myself included) as pedophiles.2 Burzynski was on the minds of several skeptics, then,
during The Amazing Meeting (TAM) 2012 skeptics’ conference that July. There we met Shane Greenup, the developer of rbutr, a browser plugin that adds a
layer of meta-commentary to the Internet by linking web pages to rebuttals. I wanted to use this new tool against Burzynski’s propaganda machine.

Among Burzynski’s most fervent promoters is animator Eric Merola, who released a 2010 movie called Burzynski: Cancer is a Serious Business, a
conspiracy-tinged hagiography “exposing” Big Pharma and the FDA trying to suppress a cure for cancer, tracing Burzynski’s legal battles, and exploiting
patients who believe that Burzynski cured them. The film received almost no attention whatsoever before March 2011, when TV’s Dr. Oz interviewed Burzynski
and Merola on his radio show and über-crank Joe Mercola promoted it on his website. From that point on, it seemed to be how most people heard of
the Burzynski Clinic. When I returned from TAM, I used rbutr to link Dr. David Gorski’s in-depth review of the movie to every single copy I could find on
the Internet, over one hundred of them up to this point.3

Before TAM, the skeptics who were fighting Burzynski had simply been online acquaintances, but shortly thereafter they initiated the first coordinated
attempt to draw attention to Burzynski’s pseudoscience by preparing a protest at the clinic. An online group was established on Facebook to put together an
effective demonstration, but because cancer patients going to the clinic had enough on their plates without being protested at, we soon decided that we’d
protest the Burzynski Clinic by raising funds for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. We sought to raise $30,000, the cost of starting one of
Burzynski’s clinical trials of antineoplastons, and we chose to do it by Dr. Burzynski’s seventieth birthday, January 23, 2013. A website,
thehoustoncancerquack.com, was set up by the new Facebook group, The Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients (SPCP), to serve as a hub for the
protests. The SPCP compiled a suite of resources and links for people who wanted to draw attention to the skeptics’ concerns about the Clinic; these
resources included guidelines written up by Tim Farley for elbowing reliable information about clinical trials into Burzynski’s Google search results.4

About two weeks before Burzynski’s birthday, writer PZ Myers announced the campaign on his blog, and the fundraising began.5 James Randi
Educational Foundation staff members (especially Brian Thompson and Carrie Poppy) informally advised the campaign. Brian devoted an episode of Consequence to the issue,6 and James Randi, a cancer survivor himself, shared his experiences and spoke up about Burzynski and his ilk
on an episode of The Randi Show.7 Rebecca Watson and the Skepchicks led a fundraising team with Rhys Morgan. Journalist and breast
cancer patient Xeni Jardin of Boing Boing covered the fundraiser. A number of prominent skeptics, including Harriet Hall, Blake Smith, Ben
Radford, and Kylie Sturgess, auctioned off skeptical swag on eBay to raise money for the effort. The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe devoted a
segment to the protest, while Richard Saunders ran promo spots for the fundraiser on The Skeptic Zone, and Kylie Sturgess’s Token Skeptic devoted an episode to the topic. Innumerable skeptics donated time, talent, and money, and on Burzynski’s birthday, they delivered
to the clinic via certified mail a challenge to match their $14,700 donation to St. Jude. They also sent Burzynski a birthday card. He declined to meet the
challenge.

A demonstration in support of Dr. Stanislaw Burzynski and his antineoplastons cancer treatment drug. (Jerzy Dabrowski/ZUMAPRESS.com)

At about the same time, a handful of skeptics started a new website, The Other Burzynski Patient Group (TOBPG). One of the most successful
recruiting tools the clinic benefits from is the constellation of former and current patients who support the Clinic. (The Clinic seems to distribute the
contact information of these supporters to prospective patients.) Many of these patients are members of the Burzynski Patient Group, where these patients,
most of them alive, share their stories of triumph over cancer. TOBPG, in contrast, collects the stories of the patients who did not make it. At
present, they have gathered over 550 names of such deceased patients, of which approximately sixty have already been fully researched, written up, and
published.8

Originally, the idea behind TOBPG was to offer balance to the overly optimistic enthusiasm of the Burzynski Patient Group; we felt it was important that
desperate and vulnerable patients encounter something other than uncritical praise of Burzynski. However, the project took on an unexpected importance when
a number of disturbing patterns in the patient stories started to emerge. Patients like Denise D., Kathy B., and Supatra A.’s father reported odd billing
practices. A far more disturbing pattern emerged after skeptics brought the case of Amelia S. to the attention of oncologist David Gorski. The parents of
Amelia, a little girl with an inoperable, almost universally fatal brain tumor, ecstatically reported online that the center of her tumor was “breaking
down.” Gorski pointed out that this pattern was far more likely to indicate that the tumor was outgrowing its blood supply, not a sign that treatment was
working.9 Amelia died a few weeks later.

Taken by itself, Amelia’s MRI results might have been an anomaly, a one-off misreading of a scan, but when it was put in the context of other patients’
stories, something frankly horrifying began to emerge: a pattern of patients (or their parents) reporting that signs of getting worse were symptoms of
improvement, often keeping patients on Burzynski’s treatment longer than they might otherwise decide to be. In fact, out of the first sixty patients
written up, no fewer than seven over a period spanning decades excitedly reported that their tumors were “breaking up in the middle,” and many more
reported that they were told their worsening symptoms were signs of getting better. When one considers that skeptics have written up only a tenth of the
names they have found, and that those in total represent a tiny fraction of the patients who have been treated at the Clinic mostly in the last decade, and
that the Clinic has been operating for over thirty-five years, the magnitude of what that place might ultimately represent becomes clear.

At the same time that the Burzynski Birthday Bash was coming together and the websites were going up, patients who felt they had been wronged by the Clinic
started reaching out to the bloggers who were writing about Burzynski. Among these patients was Wayne Merritt, one of Burzynski’s former pancreatic cancer
patients, who was threatened with legal action—called repeatedly at home no less—by not-a-lawyer Marc Stephens.10 A number of these patients did
not know how to seek redress or who to complain to; others simply wanted to share their stories and warn other patients. Skeptics put these patients in
contact with one another, with the proper regulatory authorities, and with people who would be able to help them with legal problems stemming from their
dealings with the Clinic. We’ve also reached out to patients who have expressed displeasure to let them know that they are not alone. We’ve also
established good relationships with the Clinic’s former employees, upon whom we have relied for putting new information in context. Knowing that most
patients who have decided to fundraise for Burzynski will be unlikely to be dissuaded from seeing him, we developed a patient protection checklist for them
with tips about documenting their entire experience at the Clinic.11

This screenshot from the Burzynski Patient Group’s Facebook page shows one of the doctors at the clinic posting a patients lab results, a clear violation of HIPAA.

One of the most important things skeptics have been doing has been monitoring the Clinic’s public activities on a day-to-day basis and taking appropriate
action when events warrant. For instance, when one of the physicians at the Clinic appeared to post a patient’s lab results on the Burzynski Patient
Group’s Facebook page, skeptics grabbed a screenshot (Figure 1) and sent it to the Texas Medical Board to be evaluated as a possible
federal HIPAA violation. (Shortly thereafter the patient group blocked all non-members from its page, effectively eliminating another avenue of
misinformation.) Another important action skeptics have taken is to monitor the FDA’s interactions with the Clinic and to make sure that government
agencies that might not be talking to one another are alerted to developments at the Clinic. At the beginning of 2013, the FDA was on the premises for
several weeks reviewing Burzynski’s clinical trials. When the FDA released the relevant Form 483s (preliminary observations to which the Clinic has a right
to respond before any further action is taken), skeptics had them immediately and were horrified by what they read. The inspectors found that the Clinic’s
Institutional Review Board (IRB), among other things:

• . . . used an expedited review procedure for research which did not appear in an FDA list of categories eligible for expedited review, and which had not
previously been approved by the IRB.

• . . . approved the conduct of research, but did not determine that the risks to subjects were reasonable in relation to the anticipated benefits (if any)
to subjects, and to the importance of the knowledge that might be expected to result.

• [And that a] list of IRB members has not been prepared and maintained, identifying members by name, earned degrees, representative capacity, and any
employment or other relationship between each member and the institution.12

Skeptics forwarded all of the currently available Form 483s to the Texas Medical Board, who seems to have opened a new investigation on the basis of these
observations. If and when warning letters are released, copies will be sent to the Texas Medical Board and to other professional, state, and federal
authorities who might have an interest in seeing such information.

An important development came when Simon Singh contacted the BBC investigative news program Panorama and interested them in the story of the
Clinic. Numerous skeptics, including Rhys Morgan, David Gorski, the blogger known as Josephine Jones, and me, were interviewed by phone in the winter and
spring, and we put the producers in contact with Wayne Merritt and answered questions relating to the treatment, the patients, and the Clinic. The
half-hour episode aired on June 3, 2013, and while some crucial relevant elements—such as the smears and threats leveled against the Merritts and
bloggers—were left unaddressed, as well as the decades of suspicious reports from patients, there was no doubt on the show’s Twitter stream that viewers
were outraged by Burzynski and the fact that he has been allowed to extract money from the dying for so long.13 Even papers in the United
Kingdom that had previously advertised fundraisers to send desperate patients to Burzynski revisited the story and informed readers that the patients who
they’ve sent to Burzynski feel like they were “misled.”14

Skeptics also attended every North American pre-release screening of Eric Merola’s sequel about Burzynski, where they took copious notes, usually asked
challenging questions, and generally gleaned useful information not only about the movie itself but also about the perspectives and activism of Burzynski’s
supporters. This allowed skeptics with more experience with Burzynski’s shenanigans to prepare rather detailed responses to the movie even before it was
widely available. At one of these showings, the director mentioned that members of the Burzynski Patient Group were preparing to launch a public awareness
campaign called “ANP for All.” Skeptics immediately scooped up the Facebook page and Twitter feeds, as well as the URLs ANP4all.com and ANP4all.org,
effectively hobbling the launch of that misguided venture. The replacement site, iwantanp.org, is now trademarked.

The results of this ongoing, ever-intensifying skeptical campaign are not yet complete. In its first year, The Other Burzynski Patient Group has surpassed
the number of stories that it took Burzynski nearly forty years to accumulate. The same bloggers and activists who have worked the Burzynski story so hard
for the last year and a half have no intention of letting up, and new tales from the Clinic come to us daily.15 Last, and most crucial, the
Skeptics for the Protection of Cancer Patients are using a November 15 exposé of the Burzynski Clinic on the front page of USA Today and the
recently released results of an abysmal site review by the FDA (and the subsequent warning letters) as an opportunity to press Congress to investigate how
Burzynski managed to secure permission for phase III clinical trials without having ever published a single phase II trial. The SPCP encourages all
skeptics to visit thehoustoncancerquack.com to find out how to lobby their representatives most effectively.

Burzynski’s supporters have publicly wondered whether Burzynski should leave the United States. A recent SEC filing reported that patient visits were down
in the past year, an encouraging sign, to be sure.16 Nonetheless, these efforts have not been without some consequences for the skeptics
involved. Skeptics have been so effective that Eric Merola’s most recent Burzynski hagiography spends a lot of screen time demonizing critics. Burzynski’s
supporters have contacted our employers, have complained to state licensing boards, and defamed a number of us publicly. We are fully aware that when the
Clinic dismissed Marc Stephens that it pointedly failed to retract the possibility of lawsuits against critics, a threat that hangs over all of these
activists every day. If skeptics’ concerns are founded, however, the risks to activists pale in comparison to the risks already posed to those patients on
whose behalf we are working.

Notes

1. By far the most comprehensive online resource regarding Burzynski’s career and practice is maintained by the blogger known as Josephine Jones at
http://bit.ly/sDYDRg.

]]>9/11 Trutherism Back in the NewsMon, 23 Sep 2013 12:16:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/9_11_trutherism_back_in_the_news
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/9_11_trutherism_back_in_the_news
Twelve years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, conspiracy theorists are still searching for evidence that confirms their suspicions
that what really happened on 9/11 was not what appeared in the 9/11 Commission Report. I haven’t looked at 9/11 conspiracy theories in a while. The last
time I looked at the theory at any length was in 2011, when I went to an Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth (AE911Truth) event in Atlanta and then
went out drinking with the people who attended. I wrote it up for Skeptical Inquirer, and a long version of that report is on the CSICOP website. My sense
at the time was that the political usefulness of the 9/11 conspiracy theory on the left had expired following the election of Obama and what remained was
constituted principally of hardcore believers who probably would have subscribed to a conspiracy theory anyway.

On September 9, 2013, I got an email from a new 9/11 Truth awareness campaign called, ReThink911, which is sponsored principally by AE911Truth. The idea is
to...uh, unthink what was originally thunk about 9/11 and then make a new thinking thing. On the anniversary of the attacks, the campaign toured New York.
They started the day the World Trade Center site, went to City Hall to lobby for a new investigation, and then made the rounds at a number of news outlets,
including MSNBC, the New York Times, and Democracy Now. They ended the day with a rally at Times Square underneath a sign that they had erected in
Times Square.

I had been vaguely aware that AE911Truth was raising money for a new media push around 9/11, and that they had raised enough to put the sign up in Times
Square, just under a quarter of a million dollars. It’s the centerpiece of their international awareness campaign about 9/11, and signs went up in cities
around the English speaking world, including Toronto, London and Sydney. The campaign was preceded by the release of a national poll sponsored by the
group. The email I received was the first time I had heard of it.

The email I received looked like this:

These claims set my skeptical spidey sense a-tingling. When you look at the press release that the email linked
to, the sponsors emphasized the following findings:

I was most intrigued by the qualifier in the third bullet point: “After seeing footage of Building 7’s collapse,” because this seems to be the focal point
of the argument, the basis for suggesting that it is not such a far-out claim to believe that 9/11 needs to be reinvestigated. Much of the value of the
poll, at least as far as ReThink911 is concerned, then hinges on the quality of the video they showed; if the video is of high quality and reliability,
then responses to the video perhaps become meaningful.

Before we look at the video that accompanied the poll, however, I’d like to show what I consider high quality video of Building 7’s collapse. The key to
understanding this collapse is the roof. At the beginning of the clip, you will see two structures on top of the building, and the important one is the
taller of the two, the east penthouse (left). At the beginning of the collapse (at ten seconds) you will see the penthouse collapse as the infrastructure
beneath it gives way. You can actually see the glass facade buckling directly underneath where the penthouse was before the global collapse takes place
several seconds later.

So, what we have is a collapse in two stages: first, the structures beneath the penthouse followed by the collapse of the rest of the building.

The subspecies of 9/11 Truthers who focus on the collapse of WTC 7, however, repeat as a mantra that the building collapsed “at freefall speed into its own footprint” (see my 92,600 Google references) like a controlled demolition. That’s only partially true. For a segment of the second, global stage of the collapse,
the building does seem to plummet about as fast as it can. From the first (external) indication of the collapse to the end of the event seems to me to take
about fifteen seconds, while the Truther timeline suggests a seven-second collapse. What they fail to realize is that the first collapse, under the east
penthouse damaged and weakened the structure throughout, shifted the total load of the building in ways it was not design to withstand and made a rapid
collapse possible. “But why does it look like all supports columns were cut simultaneously?” ask the Truthers. “Because,” replies the skeptic, “they were
damaged in the first part of the collapse.” I believe physicist Dave Thomas illustrated the mechanism of this part of the collapse at CSICon 2011 with a
drinking straw. When you press down at the ends of an intact plastic straw, it actually resists a good deal of force despite its flimsiness. If you put a
kink or crack in it, however, the straw buckles with almost no resistance. This effect scales up: the first part of the collapse damaged the support
columns of Building 7, and when those columns failed nothing stopped a rapid global collapse.1

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the video that was shown to those people who took ReThink911’s poll:

Four angles of the collapse of Building 7, not one of which shows the entire collapse. (Actually, at the very beginning of the video, you can see
sunlight coming out of the windows beneath where the east penthouse used to be.) It seems to me that when the sensational part of your earth-shattering
revelations depends on a video of a collapse of Building 7, you should show the whole collapse. Anything else is bound to be misleading. And even
then, you’d have to make the significance of that crucial first collapse crystal clear to the poll respondent before their response is meaningful or at all
illuminating (and even then…).

So, how did this misleading video make it into the poll? I contacted the polling company to inquire about how the poll as put together. I spoke to Ray
Martin, Senior VP at YouGov, the polling company. He said that the poll was designed in cooperation with the client and that the questions passed through
the hands of several employees independently to minimize possible bias. I followed up on this conversation with YouGov’s Research Manager Anne Gammon via
email. Explaining my concerns about the poll, I asked:

Was the omission of the first part of the collapse (more precisely, the decision to show that particular video) a decision by YouGov or of the sponsors of
the survey? Do you think that omitting that type of info had an effect on the results of the survey?

After confirming what Ray said about YouGov’s question vetting process, Gammon said:

Any factual material for the survey in the questionnaire design is taken from as neutral a news source as possible (in this case BBC News was used).

The video shown was developed in conjunction with ReThink. We are restricted in the length of video we show to our respondents and it was decided that 30
seconds should be around the time to aim for. Unfortunately this meant not showing the entire falling of the building. [emphasis added]

So the collapse was edited for time, however, it seems that in that process crucial information that might lead people to a more meaningful response was
omitted. I never found out who made the final decision about the video, but really it doesn’t matter. The footage is admittedly incomplete, and it’s
difficult to see how the poll could possibly support the weight the Truthers are putting on it without collapsing, as it were, at free-fall speed into its
own footprint. While there are myriad other problems with the survey’s framing of questions (I imagine “a group of 2000 architects and engineers [...] have
disputed the conclusions of the governments’ report” is more persuasive than “less than 1/10 of one percent of American engineers would sign our
petition”), the poll does nothing to suggest that 9/11 should be reinvestigated. If the poll reveals anything at all, it’s that when people are fed
misleading or selectively incomplete information, they draw incorrect conclusions.

Links

Note

1
An excellent technical, but highly accessible, description of World Trade Center 7’s collapse can be found in the chapter devoted to it in Ryan
Mackey’s white paper, “On Debunking 9/11 Debunking.”

]]>Nope, It Was Always Already WrongThu, 08 Aug 2013 09:51:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/nope_it_was_always_already_wrong
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/nope_it_was_always_already_wrong
Recently, the claim that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was popularized in the 1960s by the CIA to discredit those who dared to question the Warren
Commission has been popping up in the conspiracy-o-sphere. From the original PsyOp, so the story goes, the application of the phrase spread to encompass
all sorts of nefarious doings, and now people reflexively think that all conspiracy theorists are crazy. The first version that I heard, in fact, was the
claim that the term was actually invented in the 1960s, and that grabbed my attention. Really? Never appeared before the 1960s?

An infuriating feature of conspiracy theory is its propensity to take the standard of evidence that skeptics value so highly and turn it on its head:
extraordinary claims no longer require extraordinary evidence; rather an extraordinary lack of evidence is thought to validate the extraordinariness of the
conspiracy. It is thinking just gone wrong. Worse still, disconfirming evidence becomes evidence in favor of the conspiracy. I strongly suspect that the
“the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ was invented by the CIA” gambit is a fairly radical extension of this tendency, that the mere fact that so many people
recognize that conspiracy theorizing is a futile and intellectually unproductive exercise is only more proof to the conspiracy theorists that they are
really onto something.

As evidence of this deliberate manipulation of language, theorists offer up a 1967 document released in
1976 via a FOIA request, Dispatch 1035-960. In short, the CIA document outlines arguments that field operatives can use to counter conspiracy theorizing
abroad and advises where those arguments might have the largest effect. The document was released to the New York Times, but conspiracy theorists’
seizure of this notion, that what they do has been deliberately stigmatized by nefarious outside agents rather than by the internal flaws of their
arguments, ignores both linguistic and historical reality in order to flatter their delusions.

While the notion that the phrase “conspiracy theory” was weaponized has been around since at least 1997, it recently received a boost by
the Lance deHaven-Smith’s 2013 Conspiracy Theory in America, published by the University of Texas Press. So, with this stamp of apparent academic
legitimacy (I have my own opinion about that, and this is not the venue to elaborate), conspiracy theorists have begun citing this work as an authority.

Both of these findings are amplified in the new book Conspiracy Theory in America by political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith, published earlier
this year by the University of Texas Press. Professor deHaven-Smith explains why people don’t like being called “conspiracy theorists”: The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign
to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of
the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.” [emphasis added]

Well, we have a claim of fact about the origins of the term “conspiracy theorist.” This is certainly something we can check up on. I will not ascribe this
claim to deHaven-Smith. I don’t recall him making the claim that it was invented by the CIA, only that it was deliberately deployed by the CIA.

A quick search of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) finds that the phrase had been used in May 1964:

New Statesman 1 May 694/2 Conspiracy theorists will be disappointed by the absence of a dogmatic introduction.

This is two years before Dispatch 1035-960 appeared. If you go to the magazine, you will find that this sentence appears in an unsigned editorial,
“Separateness,” about the London Magazine’s recent transition from being an exclusively literary publication to a more interdisciplinary review of
the arts.

So, no. The CIA did not invent the word “conspiracy theorist.” But this made me wonder how far back I could push the use of a term like “conspiracy
theory.” Using the OED to date vocabulary is a dodgy proposition. The oldest example you are likely to find in an OED definition is
unlikely to be the first time the word was used. It might not even be the first time that the word was written down. It just happens to be the oldest
example that the dictionary’s lexicographers have found. Nonetheless, we’ll use the OED as a starting point and just be confident that the word
has to be at least as old as the first example found there.

The earliest appearance of “conspiracy theory’ in the OED goes as far back as 1909 to an article from the American Historical Review:

Amer. Hist. Rev. 14 836 The claim that Atchison was the originator of the repeal may be termed a recrudescence of the conspiracy theory first asserted by Colonel John A.
Parker of Virginia in 1880.

This sentence appears in Allen Johnson’s review of P. Ormon Ray’s The Repeal of the Missouri Compromise: Its Origin and Authorship. The sentence
that follows it makes quite clear that the phrase is being used in the modern sense: “No new manuscript material has been found to support the theory, but
the available bits of evidence have been collated carefully in this volume” (836).

While the OED is generally considered to be a standard reference work, you can actually push the date back even farther using a more recently
developed tool, Google Books. Conspiracy theory is by far the older term. In May 1890, a
theosophical journal called The Path dismissed the 1885 exposure of Helena Blavatsky by the Society for Psychical Research, in which it was discovered that Blavatsky relied on an elaborate
system of informants for her “psychic” insights, as a “conspiracy theory.” In 1881, the phrase appears in
Rhodes’ Journal of Banking: “As evidence of a conspiracy this showing is pitiful, and in any view, the charge is ridiculous, as no conspiracy theory is needed to account for the
facts.” It seems that finance has always been dogged by conspiracy theories.

An even older reference to “conspiracy theory” can be found in the medical literature of 1870, during a public debate about the growth of asylums and the
treatment of inmates in the UK. At issue were bruises and broken ribs that patients acquired in the asylums; were these the result of accidental
self-injury, perhaps a byproduct of methods of restraint, or were these punitive measures or even preventive measures meant to force compliance? It’s not
clear what the result of that debate was, but according to
research by Ian A. Burney, it pitted the Lancet against The Journal of Mental Science. Novelist and prison/asylum reform activist
Charles Reade wrote to the editors of the Pall Mall Gazette about the methods of control used in asylums in January 1870, which he came upon researching a novel about private asylums, Hard Cash. Reade
claimed his evidence was a “[...] higher class of evidence than the official inquirers permit themselves to hear. They rely too much on medical attendants
and other servants of an asylum, whose interest it is to veil ugly truths and sprinkle hells with rose-water.” (19) This evidence was the testimony of
former patients and former keepers:

The ex-keepers were all agreed in this—that the keepers know how to break a patient’s bones without bruising the skin; and the doctors have been duped
again and again by them. To put it in my own words, the bent knees, big bluntish bones, and clothed, can be applied with terrible force, yet not leave
their mark upon the skin of the victim. The refractory patient is thrown down and the keeper walks up and down him on his knees, and even jumps on his
body, knees downwards, until he is completely cowed. Should a bone or two be broken in this process, it does not much matter to the keeper: a lunatic
complaining of internal injury is not listen to. (19)

It must, I think, be admitted that the difficulties have been real, or surely they would not have evoked such an extreme hypothesis as that advanced in the Pall Mall Gazette, by a well-known novelist—an hypothesis which seems to involve every element of the sensational novel. (139)

In a comparison of Reade’s hypothesis to another one, the journal remarked:

The theory of Dr. Sankey as to the manner in which these injuries to the chest occurred in asylums deserved our careful attention. It was at least more
plausible that [sic] the conspiracy theory of Mr. Charles Reade [...]. (141)

This use of conspiracy theory, I think, is recognizable with our contemporary understanding.

What is clear is that “conspiracy theory” has always been a disparaging term. While proponents of alternative knowledge are correct in asserting that it is
possible to unfairly discredit someone by calling them a “conspiracy theorist,” they must also remember that just because you are called a conspiracy
theorist doesn’t mean you aren’t one.

]]>The Downing of Flight 800—The Conspiracy Theory I BelievedMon, 24 Jun 2013 11:58:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/twa_downing_of_flight_800the_conspiracy_theory_i_believed
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In the fall of my junior year at college, the investigation into the crash of TWA 800 was still underway. I was spending the year in Toledo, Spain and
living with a local family as an exchange student. It was an election year, 1996, the end of Clinton’s first term. I was not a Clinton fan. During one of
my calls back home, I talked to a family member whose client was an executive at TWA, which was based in my hometown of St. Louis. And my family member
told me that this client said that after the election it was going to come out that a training missile had taken down TWA Flight 800. But only after the
election.

I mentioned this conversation in passing to fellow exchange student, who I will call Joe. In September, I voted in my first presidential election for Bob
Dole by mail-in ballot at the US Embassy in Madrid. (I often wonder who that kid was. Surely not me!) In December, we were locked out of our dormitory, so
I spent the winter backpacking through Europe. In January, the students reassembled in Toledo for the spring semester. We swapped stories of our travels
and Joe took me aside and said, “When was back home, my dad told me that the day after the election, there were reports that TWA 800 was shot down by a
training missile, and I immediately thought of what you told me.” I felt that I had peered into some secret vault; that I had inside knowledge of nefarious
doings of a president I did not particularly like. And damn it, I was right; what I believed had been independently confirmed and verified. It
was, as the phrase goes, a slam dunk.

After I became interested in conspiracy theory professionally, I revisited my old theory; that TWA had been taken down by a missile, the one that I KNEW
was true. I contacted my buddy, Joe. He didn’t remember having that conversation with me. I contacted my relative who originally told me the story. He had
no idea what I was talking about.

On the evening of July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800, a Boeing 747, took off from JFK airport en route to Paris. The flight, which was originally scheduled for
an 8:00PM take off, was delayed a half hour. A few minutes into the flight, the aircraft exploded, snapping the plane into two large parts, roughly
separating the cockpit from the fuselage. Two-hundred and thirty people died. As planes generally don’t simply explode, considering that the Atlanta
Olympics were scheduled to start on the 19, and given reports of a vague threat of terrorism by a Saudi group (sent in, charmingly, by fax), terrorism was
a distinct possibility. Add to this that within the first two days of the investigation, at least a hundred eyewitness reported seeing a “flare” or
“streak” rising to hit the plane (later attributed to an optical illusion caused by the rear of the plane staying aloft slightly longer than the cockpit)
and reports that an unidentified blip on radar appeared slightly before the plane lost contact, according to a LexisNexis Academic broadcast transcript
search, a missile was one the several possibilities being discussed on television. The hypothesis appeared in print as early as July 19 in the Washington Times. On July 21, the Sunday Times reported that:

“For the first 48 hours of the investigation, the FBI focused on two main lines of inquiry: a missile or a bomb. Pentagon officials were sceptical that a
shoulder-fired surface-to-air missile could have brought down the 747, however. Both the American Stinger and the Russian SA-14 Gremlin require
considerable training to use with any accuracy. Their maximum range is 15,000ft and to have any chance of hitting an aircraft, a terrorist would need a
stable platform such as a large boat. None was seen in the vicinity.”

On July 24, the Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story entitled: “SCENARIO OF A MISSILE ATTACK: A DIFFICULT SHOT, BUT POSSIBLE.”

Over the next four months, the salvage operation dredged up 95% of the aircraft, a remarkable achievement, and the aircraft had been reassembled in a
hanger on shore. The reconstructed craft showed that the explosion had begun in the fuel tank. The remnants of TWA 800 are used to this day in training new
crash investigators. According to Newsweek:

Minute residues of explosives were found on some of the wreckage; they turned out to have been left on the plane before the crash, when the jet was used in
a drill for explosive-sniffing dogs.

On November 5, 1996, Bill Clinton was reelected to a second term as President, much to the chagrin of my weird, twenty-year old self.

On November 7, 1996, according Reuters (and reprinted in the Globe and Mail), former Kennedy advisor and ABC 20-year ABC foreign correspondent
Pierre Salinger, who was speaking to airline executives in Cannes, France, accused the US Navy of firing a training missile at the airliner. The paper
reported:

Mr. Salinger told airline officials that an agent of the U.S. Secret Service gave him a document in Paris showing that TWA Flight 800 had entered an area
where the U.S. Navy was carrying out missile tests.

On November 9, 1996, The Washington Times reported that had Salinger retracted his accusation:

One-time network TV correspondent Pierre Salinger, who commanded world attention as President Kennedy's spokesman, admitted yesterday he used old Internet
files as "evidence" that a U.S. military missile shot down TWA Flight 800 by accident.

[...]

Mr. Salinger would not show reporters in Cannes, France, the two-page document he said he received five weeks ago, but the facts he cited matched exactly a
report found by The Washington Times posted Sept. 18 on an Internet site called "cloaks-and-daggers."

In that scenario, the Boeing 747, flying unexpectedly low, was hit by an errant missile guided by the Navy's Aegis system - the type that downed an Iranian
airliner in 1988 - fired from a Navy ship out of Norfolk in "Warning Area W-105" off the Long Island, N.Y., coast.

A few days later, on November 17, the Washington Times traced Salinger’s rumor back of a missile back to its earliest incarnation:

Although he maintains he is right, Mr. Salinger concedes his source was an unnamed Frenchman. He also allows that he himself was photographed holding up
the message on the letterhead of a Landover software firm called L-Soft. The firm has sold thousands of Listserv devices that it claims deliver 11 million
electronic messages a day from Web sites.

What Mr. Salinger had was a download from L-Soft's discussion forum (http://www.lsoft.com), a site with something over
200 participants speculating on various theories about the plane crash.

The large L-Soft logo is automatically added to messages downloaded from its free forum, where a visitor finds the information by searching for
"flight-800."

"I think this list is where he got it from," L-Soft marketing executive John Karpovich told The Washington Times.

The story went back even further, as the Times reported. The day after Salinger made his accusations, a writer at EmergencyNet-News.com traced the story cited by Salinger to its
point of entry onto the Net, a writer named “Parveez Syad" or "Parveez Hussein,” who they accused of being an Iranian disinfo propagandist, though he denied that claim. The original
report, dated July 24, 1996, and with unnamed French intelligence sources and all, can be read in its entirety at the twf.org website.

How should we, then, evaluate the new testimony by former NTSB employees that there was a
cover-up, allegations that appear in a new film (which will premiere on July 17, classily on the anniversary of the crash)? It will have to account for all
of the data in the 50,000 page crash report.

The more important question, of course, is how should we evaluate my brain? Well, it seems that all of the elements of the conspiracy theory that I
believed were out on the Internet well before the election. To be fair, that year in Spain I had limited access to the Internet; the only way we could
check our email that was to buy time on a PC at a private computer retailer’s. Nonetheless, the elements were all there even before I left the country. As
vividly as I remember hearing the story before the election, and as much as it seemed to come true with Salinger’s statements, and as strange as it still
sounds and feels to me, I have to dismiss my memories. Because, really, what’s more likely, that I heard the story repeated by Salinger which
jibed with the theories I would have heard before I went to Spain, and fabricated a memory that confirmed my distrust of the president, and being in Spain
that I never heard the sound debunking of the conspiracy theory? Or that the final report, which concluded that an electrical fire in the fuel tank
initiated the blast, is a fiction, the wreckage that is used as a teaching tool for investigators is tainted, and that all of the other experts, including
500 FBI agents, police, Coast Guard, and the military personal who would have fired or seen the fateful missile fired were all lying, with never a single
leak? It seems clear. All the evidence suggests that at twenty-years old, I was a moron, and without evidence to the contrary I have no excuse to doubt
that.

Next they’ll tell me I never met Bugs Bunny at Disney World.

Sources

Adams, James and Nick Rufford. “Sea gives up clues to the fate of flight 800.” The Sunday Times. 21 July 1996.

]]>This Week in Conspiracy: For Fear of a Jesuit PlanetMon, 01 Apr 2013 08:03:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/this_week_in_conspiracy_for_fear_of_a_jesuit_planet
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In the lore of conspiracism, few religious groups, with the exception of Jews, are more feared or thought to be more powerful than the Society of Jesus
(Jesuits). As I write, it was only yesterday that the College of Cardinals elected the first Jesuit pontiff, Jorge Mario Bergoglio (now Pope Francis),
which makes you wonder: If they were so powerful, what took them so long to ascend to power?

So why are Jesuits so feared among conspiracy theorists? The reasons are many and complex. The Society of Jesus was founded in the mid-16th century, just
before the Counterreformation. Their founder, Ignatius of Loyola, was a Basque soldier who had a religious conversion while convalescing from wounds
received in battle. Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises, a formal regimen of meditation on the life of Jesus, is a foundational document still used in
the training of novitiates. Indeed, Ignatius’s Exercises were innovative theology for the time, and Ignatius is occasionally considered the first
of the Spanish mystics, who derived knowledge of God not through the sanctioned external authorities of gospel, tradition, and Church fiat, but through
revelations from internal meditation (a potentially dangerous and heretical position during the Counterreformation).

I suspect that the word “exercises” is a bit of a play on the Spanish word for army, or ejército, as the order has retained a hierarchical
structure and members adhere to a vow of obedience, giving them a bit of military feel. Indeed, the head of the order is known as the Superior General, and
the internal hierarchy gives missions to its members largely independent of the rest of the Catholic hierarchy—the Superior General is an appointment for
life and he has full control over the order. (For this reason, he is often described by conspiracists as the “Black Pope.”) The vow of obedience became
crucial in the development of the Jesuits’ reputation as missionaries, as members could be ordered to the far corners of the world to spread the gospel.
And they were. The earliest Jesuits very quickly found themselves dispersed around the world, in India, China and Japan, as well as in the Americas. As
part of their missionary charge, the Jesuits established schools around the world (indeed they had dozens of universities around the world by the time
Ignatius died in 1556). As a result they are known as an especially erudite order (or to conspiracy theorists, “shrewd”), and they have had a long
tradition of being especially friendly to the sciences.

While the educational aspect of Jesuit tradition is likely one source of the widespread suspicion of the Jesuits, as educational institutions nexuses of
influence in conspiracy lore, the fact that Jesuits do not have a specific ecclesiastical garb is probably far more central to their perceived
untrustworthiness. The Society’s founding documents detail that Jesuits’ clothing “should have three characteristics: first, it should be proper; second,
conformed to the usage of the country of residence; and third, not contradictory to the poverty we profess.” Conspiracy theorists have taken this to mean
that the Jesuits intend to “blend in” and pass unnoticed. This idea was transformed into a perceived political threat that the Jesuits were thought to
pose, as exemplified in a note from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson in 1816:

I do not like the late resurrection of the Jesuits. [...] Shall we not have more of them here, in as many shapes and disguises as ever a king of the
gypsies … assumed? In the shape of printers, editors, writers, schoolmasters, &c? … If ever any congregation of men could merit eternal perdition on
earth and in hell, it is the Company of Loyola.

Furthermore, during the Counterreformation, the Jesuits could not avoid political entanglements and controversy in Europe, as they worked hard and largely
succeeded in keeping Poland from becoming Protestant. Additionally, a handful of Jesuits were implicated in the Gunpowder Plot, lending credence to the
notion that the Order was seeking to manipulate world events. Lastly, the Jesuits maintained a special and complicated relationship to the French crown; by
the time of the Revolution, the King’s confessor was traditionally a Jesuit. The aristocracy viewed the Jesuits as suspicious because of their presumed
influence over the monarchy and association with the Vatican; the general public, unable to criticize the king directly, turned criticism of the Jesuits
became a sort of shorthand for criticism of the crown.

The Jesuits possess a number of features that one expects to see in a group of potential conspirators. They are a transnational entity, which to some puts
their loyalties in question. Their profession of loyalty to the Pope raises further concerns—indeed a whole imaginary initiation rite has been attributed
to the Jesuits, which reads in part:

I do further promise and declare that I will, when opportunity presents, make and wage relentless war, secretly and openly, against all heretics,
Protestants and Masons, as I am directed to do, to extirpate them from the face of the whole earth; and that I will spare neither age, sex nor condition,
and that will hang, burn, waste, boil, flay, strangle, and bury alive these infamous heretics; rip up the stomachs and wombs of their women, and crush
their infants' heads against the walls in order to annihilate their execrable race. That when the same cannot be done openly I will secretly use the
poisonous cup, the strangulation cord, the steel of the poniard, or the leaden bullet, regardless of the honour, rank, dignity or authority of the persons,
whatever may be their condition in life, either public or private, as I at any time may be directed so to do by any agents of the Pope or Superior of the
Brotherhood of the Holy Father of the Society of Jesus. In confirmation of which I hereby dedicate my life, soul, and all corporal powers, and with the
dagger which I now receive I will subscribe my name written in my blood in testimony thereof; and should I prove false, or weaken in my determination, may
my brethren and fellow soldiers of the militia of the Pope cut off my hands and feet and my throat from ear to ear, my belly be opened and sulphur burned
therein with all the punishment that can be inflicted upon me on earth, and my soul shall be tortured by demons in eternal hell forever.

This was in fact a late seventeenth-century forgery on the scale of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was authored by Robert Ware and is a
prime example of what Richard Hofstadter called anti-Catholic “pornography of the Puritan.”

In nineteenth-century America, the Jesuits were singled out as especially dangerous. In the 1830s, the same decade that saw the original publication of
Maria Monk’s Awful Disclosures, the publication of Richard Baxter’s Jesuit Juggling. Forty Popish Frauds Detected and Disclosed. That
same year, 1835, saw Samuel B. Morse’s (yes, that Samuel B. Morse) publication of Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States,
which posited that Jesuits were being sent to this country by Austria (?!?) to foment revolt. One book, the 1851 publication The Female Jesuit, or, The Spy in the Family, was likely inspired by a line in the Robert Ware’s fabricated oath: “[...] I will place Catholic
girls in Protestant families that a weekly report may be made of the inner movements of the heretics.”

A Jesuit berates children attending public, not private school. From O.E. Murray’s The Black Pope, or the Jesuits’ Conspiracy Against American Institutions, 1892.

By the end of the nineteenth century, fears of Jesuits (and Catholics in general) centered on the role of Catholic parochial education on the youth of the
nation, with special attention to which Bible should be used in public schools, the “Romanish” or Protestant Bible. The growing influence of Catholicism in
public life was indicative of the demographic shift that had started with the influx of poor Catholics in the early nineteenth century which eventually led
to the political mainstreaming of the Catholicism in the twentieth (though conspiracist insinuations of Rome’s potential political influence on the White
House dogged Kennedy during his election campaign).

The most visible modern incarnation of anti-Jesuit conspiracy theory seems to draw heavily on Christian fundamentalist fears of the end-times and David
Icke–levels of paranoia. I am talking about Eric Jon Phelps, who runs the website Vatican Assassins. Until this week, the website looked like it
had been abandoned, as the “News” section hadn’t been updated in almost 400 days, but the election of a Jesuit “White Pope” seems to have brought Phelps
back to the website. According to the latest, surprisingly short post: “Vatican Assassins and Eric Jon Phelps
will be making a groundbreaking announcement in the coming weeks.”

Phelps has woven a narrative of the type Michael Barkun terms a “superconspiracy,” which is characterized by vast, nested hierarchies of hidden influence.
In the case of Vatican Assassins, the Jesuits are actively bringing about the end-times and are the powers behind...well, almost every atrocity,
including the Holocaust. (The Southern Poverty Law Center has an
excellent write-up of Vatican Assassins.) I interviewed Phelps a couple of years ago at an “alternative knowledge” convention in Atlanta a few years ago. As there
were a large number of UFO conspiracy theorists in attendance, I asked him what he thought of aliens, and his answer confirmed to me that I had found my
calling:

There are no such things as aliens. The ‘Grays’ are creations of the Jesuits in their deep underground military bases through their genetic
experimentation. All the grays are hybrids. They cannot reproduce; they live short lives; they are lesser than what a man is—that’s one of the signs of a
hybrid. What I maintain is that the Jesuits have perfected their antigravity craft, and god knows what other technology, and so what they did when they
crashed at Roswell, they put those little creatures in there.

Because when you inadvertently reveal one secret technology, the really clever conspirator covers it up with…another secret project. Because nobody would
expect that.

]]>Conspiracy Theory Roundup (February 9, 2013)Tue, 26 Feb 2013 13:16:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/conspiracy_theory_roundup_february_9_2013
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The Conspiracy Theory Roundup is an ongoing series of news items from around the web relevant to connoisseurs of conspiracism. I’ve been at it for over two
years at www.skepticalhumanities.com, compiling an (almost) weekly running list of improbable stories and
fantastic tales of intrigue. What I have found is that there is a parallel world to the one that most of us live in, an alternative timeline of human
development, one dominated by shadowy elites and hidden technologies and gloriously exposed by alternative scholars. In one sense, the conspiracists’
history is a story that repeats itself over and over. In this world, every high profile mass shooting, for instance, is guaranteed to be a false flag event
designed as a pretext to disarm the populace in preparation for a tyrannical takeover. Nonetheless, the inventiveness of conspiracy theorists (or perhaps
the eclectic nature of what they take for evidence) makes each theory unpredictably unique in its details.

First, a few things that I will cover. A frequent feature of conspiracy theory is racism. This is, of course, horrid, and the stories are often disturbing,
but they need to be covered and put in context. Stories about ultra-nationalism and hate crimes also often have a conspiracist bent, so they may appear to
be disproportionately represented.

Second, a few things that I won’t be reporting on (if I can avoid it). The first is sports conspiracy theories. Sometimes the ball takes a
bad bounce. Get over it. New posts on tired run-of-the-mill conspiracy theories are out too, because, really, does anyone need to see another YouTube video
about how the international bankers are running the world? Now, if there is a new element, like, the banksters plan to smuggle chemical weapons into a
populated area via kangaroo pouches, well, I’ll consider it. I may occasionally dip into the history behind these stories, but for the most part, we’ve
been there, done that. I am genuinely interested in conspiracy theories that start outside of the United States, but I often lack the background to give
the context of those conspiracy theories, so you may find my collection rather skewed towards the U.S. (Don’t hesitate to help me correct that, by the
way!)

Lastly, if you have tips and links to new and interesting conspiracy theories, send them to me. I want to hear them.

Let’s do this.

A new conspiracy is floating around the theory-o-sphere, according to www.MotherJones.com. Apparently Obama is
unleashing deadly irony against foes opposed to his stance on gun control. By having them shot.

“The Dark Knight Rises” map of Sandy Hook is on “Hinckley Island.” John Hinckley, Jr. tried to assassinate Pres. Reagan in 1981. The Hinckley family is
friends to the Bush family. Bush = New World Order. Also on the map, the school is located where the football stadium attack occurs.

A hip-hop marketing gimmick, making references to the Illuminati, has spawned its own mythology and pseudoscholarship. I expect copious analysis of
Beyonce’s halftime show
in the near future. The most prolific and obsessive decoder of all things Illuminati in hip hop that I know of writes at the Vigilant Citizen website.
Amazingly, everything he has ever examined on that site has confirmed to him that the Illuminati is, for some reason, reminding everyone constantly that
they are secretly in control. Here’s his take on the Super Bowl.

Amy Shira Teitel has the lowdown on a conspiracy about the Apollo 1 disaster, when three astronauts died on
the launchpad.

In a shocking twist of events lending credence to theintelhub.com’s investigation, it has now been
admitted by officials that there is a potential that multiple shooters carried out the bloody massacre that took place at the Sandy Hook Elementary School
the morning of December 14, 2012.

That would be a shocking twist, especially people who follow the chain of reporting back to the source! Shep links to his source, Ralph Lopez’s “Sandy Hook
DA cites 'potential suspects,' fears witness safety,” wherein we find:

The statement by the CT prosecutor's office is the first indication from state authorities that Adam Lanza may have not acted alone.

Well, not really. This is a highly emotionally charged issue, and I should point out that probably most people who have participated in the events at Sandy
Hook have come under the scrutiny of conspiracy theorists. I think of poor Gene Rosen, who, because he helped six
kids whose teacher had been shot, has been harassed by conspiracy nuts. Nothing in that statement suggests anything more, and while the statement in no way
limits the scope of the investigation, it does not offer positive evidence for another shooter or suspect. And I would also like to point out that the
headline is also grotesquely disingenuous. The State’s Attorney’s written statement actually says:

[D]isclosure and delivery of the affidavit would seriously jeopardize the outcome and success of the investigation by divulging sensitive and confidential
information known only to investigators and any potential suspect(s) and also identify persons cooperating with the investigation thus possibly
jeopardizing their personal safety and well-being.

It’s not saying that there are “potential suspects,” as suggested by the headline (Lopez actually changed the wording and put it in quotes!), it’s saying if there are—it’s conditional. Further, the word “witness” doesn’t appear in the affidavit or court order, which is important because a “witness”
is not the same thing as “[person] cooperating with the investigation.” Most important, I think, is the State’s Attorney’s statement in the affidavit that,
“No arrests have been made and none are currently anticipated, but have not been ruled out,” which is totally missing from Shep’s write-up. From there,
Ambellas’ sloppy reporting leaped to Before It’s News,
and the rest is pseudohistory.

Joel Dyer
gives a quick but accurate sketch of how modern conspiracist thinking came to be and an overview of its violent potential.

Our final story this week comes from France, where the famous 1830 painting, “Liberty Leading the People,” by Romantic artist Eugene Delacroix was defaced by a 9/11 Truther. The painting, which was on the 100 franc note for decades, was
tagged by a twenty-eight-year old woman who scrawled “AE911” on it while it was on loan to a branch of the Louvre. She is now in custody. AE911 is short
for the truther activist group Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, which is headed by Richard Gage. www.AE911truth.orgput up a notice on the 8th, the day after the incident, which made dubious statements like, “We do not know if this act of vandalism was done in reference to our organization.” What
part of the graffiti naming their group don’t they understand? They sure do seem sure about what to conclude from a whole lot of less convincing evidence!

Richard Gage, the founder of the group, made a completely self-serving statement on the occasion of his group’s newfound “popularity” in France:

“I was shocked and horrified to learn of this senseless act of vandalism. I sincerely hope that this unbalanced person is not in any way associated with
our numerous volunteers in France. Our organization prides itself on the integrity of its activists, who are seeking a real, unimpeachable investigation of
the destruction of the three World Trade Center skyscrapers on 9/11.”

I would like to vouch for the integrity of the Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth’s activists. Unfortunately I can’t since I was once defamed by them
in perhaps the most amusing way possible—with a chimeric LOLcat.

That’s what I have for now. A new edition will come out in a few weeks.

RJB

]]>Information Cycle of ViolenceFri, 11 Jan 2013 12:43:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/information_cycle_of_violence
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/information_cycle_of_violence
I write again on the occasion of another sad mass shooting in America. The nature of the shooting, an attack that killed a score of children and half a
dozen others at a school in Connecticut, is simply horrific; any comprehension of it eludes the healthy mind.

Conspiracy theorists are already busy on the job weaving imaginary connections and, not twenty-four hours in, had begun forcing the facts into standard
pre-existing narratives for mass-shootings. The most popular so far seem to be that the shooter was brainwashed, that there were actually multiple
shooters, and that the whole event was planned as a pretext for a government gun-grab.

Again.

We have been flooded with a constant barrage of information about this tragedy since it began to unfold, and not all of that information has been true.
Some has been spectacularly far from the mark. In order to formulate a thoughtful response to the horrors inflicted upon us by the shooter, no matter his
intention or disposition, we need to be able to understand how information comes to us and understand that we can anticipate that it will change.

This will perhaps be a basic primer for many readers of the CSI website, and I may be restating something that skeptics do instinctively, but it’s worth
repeating. New media, especially YouTube, has changed the public’s relationship to news and information in a way that has made conspiracy theories not only
more prevalent but also a much more participatory pursuit. For this reason, it is vital that any student of conspiracy theory attain some degree of media
literacy. A good place to start is with the information cycle.

The “information cycle” is a concept that comes out of media studies and posits that newsworthy information passes through a fairly consistent sequence of
media outlets as it makes its way into the history books. Knowing the stage in the information cycle at which a particular source was produced can help
researchers determine what a source is best used as evidence of. For example, let’s consider the story of the Challenger disaster. When television
viewers watching the launch live saw the shuttle explode, the story began its course through the information cycle. The first news reports that people
encountered were in broadcast media, both on television and radio as events unfolded live. The limited amount of information that was known was reported as
it was received. That information was soon augmented by eyewitness accounts and backed by the speculation and commentary of experts and pundits.

The first complete accounts the events (cause still unknown) were the stories in the newspaper the next day. Over the next weeks and months, as the story
developed and the investigation into the disaster focused on the mechanical and management failures that contributed to the disaster, the story passed into
weekly magazines, where the topics were explored in more depth and at some length. Finally we saw the Challenger disaster work its way into
journals and books, where the event was likely to be placed within an informed and more fully fleshed-out historical context.

The information cycle, which one thinks of as “the way in which newsworthy events are experienced and understood over time,” is changing, and a lot of this
is due to the possibilities of new media. A defining aspect of new media is how it has changed audience members’ relationship to information from that of
passive consumers to that of active participants in the creation of content. This has come about through the widespread availability of cheap video cameras
and inexpensive video editing software. The type of media that used to take a large production studio, pressroom, and distribution network to disseminate
now takes minutes for a single person with an Internet connection to get out there.

Despite the conspiracy theorists’ claims that media gatekeepers are constantly withholding vital information from the public, modern media makes it easier
for inaccurate initial information to spread and endure. Take, for instance, what happened when an unnamed law enforcement source leaked a name that was
reportedly that of the Sandy Hook shooter, “Ryan Lanza.” This was a misidentification, but the announcement set off a cascade of events that led to the
wrong image being used to identify the shooter on CNN, Fox News, CBS, and innumerable other outlets within minutes. According to Jeff Jarvis, an experienced journalist and
professor who prematurely shared his observations about a twitter account that later turned out to not be the Sandy Hook shooter’s:

One of the key skills of the journalist today is not to say what we know, but to say what we don’t know. That’s been the case since 24-hour cable news came
along, where everybody becomes a witness to a story as it unfolds and those of us who were reporters back in the day of pay telephones and notebooks know
that oftentimes by the time our deadline came around, we learned a lot more and we were saved from many ‘instant errors’ because of the time and the
structure of the press. Well, that’s gone now, both because of 24-hour cable news and now because of the Internet, and further gone because anyone can do this. So it’s not just about training journalists when that photo gets retweeted, retweeted and retweeted, it’s the same
difference—it doesn’t matter if a journalist did it.

Furthermore, news, no matter its quality or accuracy, has a longer lifespan on the Internet than it did two decades ago. Footage of erroneous reporting can
be captured and distributed widely, and those images retain their immediacy as they get mixed and remixed into no-budget YouTube conspiracy videos
alongside better information, often making it difficult to discern what is good information and what is bad information. What comes to mind immediately is
the eyewitness testimony of people who had been near the Twin Towers when they collapsed. The sound bites and interviews of stunned people covered in gray
dust have been archived and live on in cyberspace. This is not a bad thing in itself, of course, but without an awareness of where those clips entered the
information cycle (and the subsequent possibility that that information will turn out to be if not completely inaccurate, at least incomplete) someone
viewing those clips now might be led to some rather improbable conclusions.

Forgetting that reporters, as a rule, try not to report what is known to be inaccurate information, conspiracy theorists will point to the early, more
tentative reporting as evidence that something is being swept under the rug. In reality, a week into the Sandy Hook story, parallel narratives had
developed in the mainstream media and in the alternative (and proud of it) media. In the mainstream media, the story is that of an investigation into the
motivation of Adam Lanza, the individual who was found dead at the scene with a gun taken from the house of a relative who had been shot the same day, and
the individual who reportedly was too impatient to wait for a background check when he tried to legally secure his own weapon a few weeks ago. Some would
call this converging evidence leading to an increasingly certain conclusion that Adam Lanza was in fact the one who pulled the trigger.

In the alternative media, the possibilities and uncertainties are blossoming unabated, leading to increasingly baroque explanations and imaginary linkages.
Conspiracy theorists have predictably seized on the earliest, most confused and jumbled reporting that came out on the morning of the shooting. Veterans Today contributor Kevin Barrett
wrote on Dec 17:

Since we know that many if not most “lone nut” massacres are actually false-flag operations, we might as well assume that this one is too. Getting that
message out early, in order to shape public opinion while it is still malleable, should be a top priority of everyone who wants to put the real terrorists
out of business.

[...] So the first priority of all truth-seekers must be to “catapult the counter-narrative” as quickly as possible.

This is especially horrifying for those of us who value conclusions drawn from evidence over conclusion-driven cherry picking. Barrett follows up with a
widely-circulated list of “inconsistencies” that in part draws on confused reporting from the first day’s events, which, though discarded from the media’s
narrative of events as more evidence has accumulated, endures as the “official story” in the minds of conspiracy theorists. These include early reports
that the shooter was wearing body armor (he wasn’t), that the mother of the shooter was connected to the school (she wasn’t), and the misidentification of
the shooter as Ryan Lanza (the shooter was his brother, Adam).

Confusion and contradicting reports are exactly what we should expect in the earliest hours of a news story. We should expect the false reports to
travel far in the media and online. We should expect news reporters who are interested in the truth to adjust their stories to conform to the evidence as
new evidence becomes available. What conspiracy theorists identify as “cover-up” is actually good journalism, and it is helping audiences understand this
is something that the media should emphasize. Jeff Jarvis makes the point nicely:

I think that we have a larger job and a bigger challenge which is to make sure that everyone knows that you can’t trust what you learn immediately, and
that if you do choose to spread it, that you have a responsibility to say how you know what you know.

]]>Enemies, Mostly DomesticMon, 17 Sep 2012 13:56:00 EDTinfo@csicop.org ()http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/enemies_mostly_domestic
http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/enemies_mostly_domestic
The last month has seen a disturbing number of high-profile mass shootings, and these events, when filtered through the conspiratorial worldview, become distorted and magnified in strange and interesting ways. In the footnotes of my previous Conspiracy Guy article, I made reference to Wayne LaPierre, the CEO of the National Rifle Association, who has again made it a part of his election-year rhetoric that Barack Obama is plotting against the Second Amendment:

Tavis Minnear, a writer for the Ashland Times-Gazette, reported that in November 2008, a year that saw the Supreme Court uphold handgun rights in Washington, D.C., and only a week after Obama’s election, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA told members: “...that an ‘elite ruling class’ of anti-gun politicians has ‘declared war on our individual rights’ by trying to restrict Americans' ability to keep and bear arms.

“Seventy-five years ago in his first inauguration as president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,' he said. Today, I would argue almost the exact reverse is true. The greatest thing we have to fear in many ways is not enough Americans are afraid, because not enough realize what grave dangers are out there to our freedoms.” (http://bit.ly/KVWVvM)

This rhetoric, whether cynically uttered or not, is a major component of a widely held belief of the paranoid right that the federal government is going to disarm the populace and then sweep in an impose tyranny, or martial law, put the “true patriots” into FEMA-run concentration camps, or whatever. Crucial to this fantasy of oppression is that there will be a high profile false-flag attack on the American people, which will of course serve as a pretense for taking away all of the guns. The past month has sadly seen a number of high-profile mass shootings that quickly became fodder for conspiracy theorists.

Predictably, as soon as word of the theater shooting in Aurora, CO broke on July 20, and as the human toll became clear (twelve dead and fifty-eight wounded), the conspiracy-theory-o-sphere was abuzz with speculation about what REALLY happened in that darkened movie theater. In the first few days after the shooting, the number of people who were “actually” responsible for the shooting swelled beyond reason; the FBI, CIA, the Illuminati, MK-Ultra, and the President all were named as being behind the shooting. It seemed that everyone except the person who pulled the trigger was responsible for the massacre. To many, the destruction of the Second Amendment seemed imminent.

To conspiracists, it was clear that the shooter was a patsy and that by definition this had been a false-flag event. As often happens, conspiracy theorists misjudged the relative usefulness of the first burst of eyewitness accounts, which suggested that there might have been an accomplice inside the theater to open the emergency exit for the shooter. In the fullness of time, the investigation found that the shooter acted alone. Of course, revelations that the suspect, James Holmes, had been a graduate student in neuroscience at the University of Colorado instantly led to the contention that he was some sort of mind-controlled hit man. Conspiracy theorists also latched onto word that the alleged gunman’s father had once worked for a company that had DARPA contracts. To them, the mind-control hypothesis seemed the natural conclusion from Holmes’s apparently disoriented and bizarre countenance at his first court appearance.

On August 5, word broke of another mass shooting, this time at the Sikh Temple outside of Milwaukee. Six people were killed and four were injured. The only suspect, Wade Michael Page, killed himself at the scene. Page had been a figure in the white supremacist “hate core” music scene and had been tracked by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The conspiracy theories that surfaced following the Sikh shooting were of two types. The first was conventional and fit well within a rather worn conspiracy narrative. The other, not so much.

The first, an example of which I take from the execrable white supremacist site Stormfront.org, claims that a white veteran was set up/drugged and disposed of, or in the words of commenter Thor9019: “So this was likely a set up from the start and now they can go and blame it on 'white supremacists' like they always do.”1

This is actually a long-standing self-pitying and persecutory narrative that goes back at least as far as the Oklahoma City bombing, which was of course carried out by former military, unapologetic white supremacists. And it closely parallels the plot of a peculiar and frustrating bit of what Tom Lolis (interviewed in my last article) has termed “militia fiction,” Matthew Bracken’s Enemies Foreign and Domestic (2003). I say frustrating because it represents a world where the paranoid are correct about the government’s conniving to take their guns away and impose tyranny. In the opening scene of the novel, a sniper opens fire into an arena at a sporting event, spurring a widely televised panic that results in hundreds of deaths. Killed at the scene is a disturbed but upstanding veteran who it is clear has been drugged and is being painted as a white supremacist.2 This is the role that Page has been painted into by conspiracists.

A second line of conspiracy theories that has sprouted out of the Sikh killings was decidedly less expected. It began, I believe, when UFOlogist and Disclosure Project founder Steven Greer tweeted: “Sirius filmmaker Arm Kaleka's father shot at Sikh Temple. He is on scene now. Please pray for his family. Dr. Greer.”

Sirius is the title of a documentary project that Greer and filmmaker Amardeep Kaleka are working on and have been attempting to raise funds for. Kaleka’s father was the Temple President and was killed. Last year, Greer was a keynote speaker at the TruthCon in Atlanta, which I wrote about in my first CSI article. Greer was drumming up funds for his Orion Project, a scheme that would extract free energy from the expansion of the universe and deliver it to the people of the world, ending war and hunger for the bargain basement price of $5.7 million. The $5.7 million is earmarked for a secure facility where Greer can protect the scientists he’s recruited and their families from the Secret Government. It appears that the movie Sirius is intended to cover the Orion Project.

Within nanoseconds of Greer’s tweet, and even though I have seen neither Kaleka nor Greer claim that this was an attempt to silence them, UFO conspiracy theorists were raising the alarm. The blossoming of potential suspects in response to a single YouTube video about the shooting includes: JFK’s killers, Nazis, illegal black ops, private companies who put microchips in hit men’s heads, the CIA, Big Oil, bankers, and the Wall Street elite.3 Elements of the other line of conspiracy also appear in the comments, for instance, that the media are now actively pushing hate crimes laws (thought to unjustly punish whites), and that the media is being spun and distracted by the white supremacist angle. Unlike history, which jostles out untruths and favors facts to ultimately settle on a version of events that historians agree upon, conspiracy theory is ever more open and resists closure and consensus, ensuring that those who practice it will never be satisfied.

Notes

1. Another poster, the ironically named “Ballistic,” remarked:

“You know it's curious - every single one, without exception, of the racially-aware/White Nationalist-minded people I personally know are the most unremarkable, and least "extreme" people one could meet!! They are in no way distinguishable from any other White American - and in many cases, their own friends and family are probably totally unaware of their political/ideological outlook.”

2. While Bracken makes clear that the gun-owner veterans who are at being framed for hate crimes by the government are in no way racist, one of his main (and presumably meant to be sympathetic) characters says: “If they really wanted to stop terrorism, they’d go after the real threat, and they still won’t even say there’s a problem with Muslims. And now they’re trying to frame up white ‘militias’ as the next big terrorist threat.” Touché. ↩

One of the most disturbing and popular books in white supremacist subculture is The Turner Diaries. Its author, William Pierce, who penned the thing under the name Andrew MacDonald, was a physics PhD who taught at the Oregon State University in the 1960s; Pierce became a leading American Nazi Party member (and editor of their journal) and eventually founded the National Alliance, which was for a while the most well-funded white nationalist group in the U.S. The Turner Diaries was published serially before it was released as novel in 1978. Pierce also authored Hunter, a book about a serial killer who stalks and executes mixed-race couples.

In the years since Barack Obama’s election, the number of anti-government militia groups (as defined by the Southern Poverty Law Center) has exploded from 150 to over 1250. 2012 was also the first year that most of the babies born in the United States were not white. These demographic and social changes, augmented by an entrenched and politically active nativist movement that targets illegal immigrants, should encourage our awareness of the ideological fountain from which the racist subset of these militias draw, including The Turner Diaries.

To discuss The Turner Diaries, I sat down at a Mexican restaurant for a taco with Tom Lolis, my colleague and fellow Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at Georgia Tech. Tom is a Renaissance scholar who has taught writing classes about the occult, but also takes a professional interest in conspiracy and conspiracy theories. As we sat down and ordered tacos, I pulled out my copy of The Turner Diaries and placed it on the table face down.

“You brought a copy?” Tom asked.

“When I first heard about it I downloaded pages as a PDF and printed them up on the department printer,” I said. “I ran down to the copy room to make sure that nobody intercepted it, because if someone did, it would be the end of me.”

“Yeah, it’s not the type of book that you read on the bus. If the other people on the bus knew what you were reading ...” he trailed off.

“… they’d rightly kick my ass,” I finished.

“Yeah, especially if they don’t assume that you are a college professor interested in this because it is a book of dangerous and terrible ideas.”

I showed him the promotional blurb by Timothy McVeigh on the back cover. “How did you get your copy?” I asked.

“I made the horrible mistake of ordering it online, which has probably put me on who knows how many watch lists? And it also started getting me inundated with pamphlets and catalogues from companies that I wish I didn’t know existed. I don’t recommend anyone does that.”

Tom gave a brief outline of the book’s premise. A resistance group known as “the Order” “is going to protect America from itself. The group has the aims of creating a white society, and in particular targets African-Americans and Jews. The novel suggests that Jews run the world, that Jews pull the strings, and that African-Americans are their unwitting flunkies, the unfortunate dupes who supposedly don’t know better (and of course a word like ‘African-American’ is nowhere to be found in the book).”

To Pierce, protecting America from itself means inciting a revolution, Tom said. “What seems to kick start this incendiary movement [in the novel] is an act called the ‘Cohen Act,’ which is a proposed bill to take our guns away, so it grafts that fear onto this race-hatred, and this becomes the realization for this group that they have to strike now, because once the guns are taken away, once the guns have been physically seized from your home, the Jews win.”1

The act that sets the revolution in motion is a truck bomb that destroys the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. “You always see in the lore of the militias that there is always going to be one act that triggers the revolution,” I said.. “All they have to do is strike against the Feds, for instance, and that’s going to spark the revolution. Even that Breivik guy, kinda thought that he was going to foment revolution. The Hutaree narrative: kill a cop, start a revolution. In The Turner Diaries, the act that is going to set things off is an attack on the FBI headquarters. This has some real world implications.”

Tom agreed. “What’s weird is what Breivik has been spouting off in Norway sounds very Turner Diary-esque, this claim that he is a part of this secret cell. [In the Turner Diaries] we have this network of terrorist cells that work together but don’t always know what the other is doing. And it’s also this quasi-theological order; there’s a lot of white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism mixed in with this notion of a master race.” The major difference seems to be that Breivik substitutes the Muslims for the Jews in his conspiratorial hierarchy.

Tom suggested that the structure of the book, framing the story in the form of a revolutionary’s journals, gives the story a sense of authenticity. “It allows the reader to imagine a world where the Revolution has already happened. [...] The book sets the time of the action in the 1990s and we’re reading the journals [of martyr Earl Turner] a hundred years beyond that, when the world has completely changed (for the worse),” Tom said. “Asia has been made a desert via a nuclear strike, Africa has been ethnically cleansed—all of it. Puerto Rico has been colonized by whites, and there’s a whole list of other atrocities. In the final scene, our ‘hero,’ Mr. Turner, goes on a suicide run [in a small airplane] to nuke the Pentagon. New York is also hit with nuclear weapons because it’s seen as a sort of a Jewish capital.”

“It’s a sort a blueprint for the revolution that they are hoping will come,” I said, referring to a scene which describes in detail exactly how to prepare and bury weapons in the woods to keep them from being seized by authorities.

Tom nodded. “It’s very much, I think, a how-to manual, or at least it’s intended to be. What its efficacy could be, let’s hope we never find out, but it seems that the design is I’m going to tell an entertaining story (entertaining in huge quotes) because people are going to pass on the instructional manual. If you don’t have the wherewithal to sit through hundreds of pages of pure polemic, we’ll couch it in story.”

Tom paused. “I think one of the things that is so disturbing about the book is that the prose is actually not terrible, in the sense that had he been a gentler man, or a reasonable man, Pierce may have been able to have crafted a career as a bestselling novelist. It has that sort of page turner quality. The sentences are clean. It was one of the slowest books I ever read, though, because of the content and how hard it was to take, but I think if you looked at it purely as a prose stylist, you know, he can write. It’s not going to be high art, but there’s a story. It’s a terrible story. And I think that might account for this book’s success, that it has a sort of ‘thriller’ feel. I think that’s what makes it stand out from a lot of similarly themed fiction. And any other book I can think of that has achieved visibility, any vision of the world comparable to this, say, in science fiction, this is going to be presented as uniformly dystopian.”

“That’s the scary thing,” I chimed in. “Hitler was quite a utopian. A lot of these sorts of movements have this utopian vision and there’s no other way, you either go all the way toward the utopian world or the world is corrupt, and there’s nothing in between.”

Our tacos arrived. When we finished lunch, I mentioned that The Turner Diaries is part of a larger body of work, a collection of similarly themed novels. “I don’t think that most people would realize that there is an entire subgenre of what you have termed ‘militia fiction.’ What are some of the other books in that genre?”

“As far as books that have achieved heavy circulation,” Tom said, “you can take Unintended Consequences, which Tim McVeigh read in jail. It’s a long novel, 1,000-plus pages. It’s another one that [has] a bestseller prose style. That one is more about resistance against the ATF as opposed to killing ethnic groups. I think that’s become dominant in subsequent novels, taking the subversive tendencies of The Turner Diaries and turning them more toward political agencies than toward ethnic groups. Now in some of those works, we might find the underlying theme of ethnic groups controlling these agencies but the ATF will be front and center, or the FBI.

“I think that [The Turner Diaries] is the most prominent because it has been associated with specific crimes. Obviously you’ve got McVeigh. [A copy of the book was found in McVeigh’s car when he was arrested.] There was the case of the dragging of the African American man—I believe his name was James Byrd—in Texas. One of the assailants said that they were ‘starting The Turner Diaries early,’ so there’s clear association there. I’m not suggesting that reading a book drives you to commit violence, but those who are inclined toward that type of crime seem to gravitate toward it. [...] I don’t think that it works well as a conversion tool. I can’t see anyone picking it up and saying, ‘It changed my ideas.’

“You know, the Order, which was responsible for killing [Colorado radio host] Alan Berg [in 1984], the talk show host—the name of that group comes from The Turner Diaries. Berg was taken out because he was supposed to be a Jewish mouthpiece. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but I don’t think that’s a coincidence either.”

“We end with nuclear strikes,” Tom concluded. “When this is written [in the late 1970s], nuclear terror is at the top of the list, in terms of our cultural anxiety, so it makes sense that we end with a nuclear attack. And it’s this utopian vision, this idea that all other races are wiped off the globe. Those few who remain we recolonize all over again to create a new workforce. This is seen as a sort of ultimate moral good, within the frame of the disturbed mind of the narrator and author.”

Notes

1. It should be noted that this is a type of argument from fear that we see in recent statements by the National Rifle Association, which floats conspiracy theories about people scheming to take their guns away. Tavis Minnear, a writer for the Ashland Times-Gazette, reported that in November 2008, a year that saw the Supreme Court uphold handgun rights in Washington, D.C., and only a week after Obama’s election, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA told members:

...that an ‘elite ruling class’ of anti-gun politicians has ‘declared war on our individual rights’ by trying to restrict Americans' ability to keep and bear arms.

Seventy-five years ago in his first inauguration as president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt said 'The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,' he said. Today, I would argue almost the exact reverse is true. The greatest thing we have to fear in many ways is not enough Americans are afraid, because not enough realize what grave dangers are out there to our freedoms. (http://bit.ly/KVWVvM)

To fans of The Turner Diaries, those unnamed “elites” are Jews, but the structure of the narrative offered the NRA is the same. A powerful group is working below the radar to take away Americans’ guns. Not everyone knows the truth, but you do. You must resist this to preserve your way of life. In every way, this is a classic conspiracy theory operating as mainstream political rhetoric. You may remember that in the days after Obama’s election, ammunition sales spiked, and LaPierre is again warning constituents about “Obama’s secret plan to destroy the 2nd Amendment by 2016” (http://bit.ly/ue0GA0). ↩